‘Young men, mostly. Some are military, I think. I tell them things, but I don’t have any recollection of what was said, just blank spots in my memory.’
I stopped short of asking how much money she had collected and said, ‘He must have big plans for you.’
‘For me? Maybe.’
She lay back and plucked at my arm, urging me down onto the cool bone surface beside her.
‘Why’d you wait so long to tell me this?’ I asked.
‘I don’t want to talk anymore,’ she said, fiddling with the top button of my jeans.
I pushed her hand away. ‘Was it the dragon? Did it feel like a message, as if he wanted you to tell me now?’
‘Un-uh. Don’t you want to fuck?’
‘One more question. Say you’re right about everything, about the dragon. How can you trust him? A beast, a giant lizard that has a really good reason to hate us. How can you think any change he brings will have a good effect?’
Even as I asked the question I suspected her answer would be the same that I had received from Ex when we argued about the value of revolution some months earlier:
‘You’ve been here how long? Four years? Five? Long enough to realize that any change is welcome in Temalagua. Any chance that things will improve, however slight, is welcome. You can’t impose your American logic on us. You people are smothered by the media, by lies, by silk sheets and fatty foods. Most of you don’t notice how fucked you are. Here the government doesn’t bother to hide things from us. Savagery, poverty, and injustice are shoved in our faces every day. We’re fucking desperate! If change makes things worse . . . so what?’
Yara’s answer was more succinct, yet no less to the point. Once she had spoken she pressed her body against mine and said, ‘Come on! I don’t want to talk.’ She kissed my neck, my mouth and eyes, and though I had further questions I allowed myself to be converted from inquisitor to lover.
That night was as close as I came to complete intimacy with her. I put my lips to her ear and told her I loved her, yet I didn’t whisper the words, I merely shaped them with my mouth. For one thing I was leery about what saying the words out loud would portend, but I suspect more devious motives were in play. By this inaudible, irresolute declaration I may have been hoping to convince myself that I wasn’t just a victim of sexual infatuation, but a real boy capable of real love, and so I pretended to be afraid that if she heard me, she might react badly, she might throw me out or something of the sort . . . because I had no clue, really, as to how she felt about me or about love or any of it. Then again, I may have been daring her to hear me, making said declaration so close to the range of the audible that she might hear the slight popping of my lips and deduce from this that I had spoken and conclude that ‘I love you’ was the most likely message, thereby leaving it up to her aural acuity and emotional state as to whether or not we would go to the next level. Someone once wrote that love is the drink that does not kill thirst, meaning that one’s thirst for love is inexhaustible, or that love is an addiction that demands more and more of it in order to satisfy the lover, and yet, like an opiate, has less and less effect, so that in the end demand outstrips supply. While these interpretations are congruent and both undoubtedly true, in the case of Yara and myself love became a perverse psychological competition, a power struggle wherein we used our attitudes and our principles (such as they were) to deconstruct the very thing we desired before it could disappoint us, because we knew the game was fixed.
Snow’s narrative continues for another 156 pages, many treating of the tedious day-to-day life in the camp, an almost equivalent number constituting a disquisition on the nature of love, also tedious and overly analytic (as the preceding paragraph foreshadows), and some few detailing and explaining (‘justifying’ might be more precise a word, for he appears to have borne a heavy burden of guilt) the circumstances under which, four months after initiating a relationship with Yara, he sneaked away from the clearing, intending never to return. He cites as the root cause of his abandonment the ominous atmosphere that accumulated about the place and goes on to describe the event that precipitated his escape.
